NE 20th Anniversary / History of New Element - 2016

The History of NE

When 2016 began, it’s hard to imagine anyone expecting the year to be one of such change and evolution for NE. But that’s exactly what happened, especially with the growth of OpenRCT2. I personally think of this time as the beginning of a new era in the community, and really the beginning of what might be considered sort of a renaissance at New Element. The community was resistant to some of this change initially, unsurprisingly, as it causes a few teething issues but we quickly learned how valuable adopting the new would become.

But first, the year started off with a bang. The release of Busch Gardens Asia by Robbie92, perhaps the most hyped park of all time, certainly in my history on New Element. An instant spotlight, really hard to imagine anyone sober actually selecting no in the spotlight voting here, the only question was just how high the accolade score might be. It was certainly a rocky road for Robbie, hitting the object limit far from the park's completion forced him to significantly cut back on his ambition with the project and re-work some areas to carve out as many object slots as possible. Enlisting help from a few object makers to squeeze as much out of the game as possible, the park was finished, or maybe not… but that's neither here nor there. When the final vote was entered and the accolade score dropped everyone was shocked, 98.13%, nearly perfect. Busch Gardens Asia was now the new king of the accolade panel score, surpassing previous best Starpointe by almost 4%. To this day this score has not been approached, and maybe never will. Also quite notable that BGA was the first spotlight winner since Airtimes Thorpe Park in March of 2014, an almost 2 year wait, one of the longest in the site's history.

Busch Gardens Asia by robbie92	Busch Gardens Asia by robbie92
Busch Gardens Asia by robbie92	Busch Gardens Asia by robbie92

When the dust settled, it's almost as if a weight had been lifted off the community’s collective shoulders. Finally, a new spotlight! After a decent batch of near misses, this seemed to effectively open the floodgates on a stream of new spotlight parks that would last until the end of 2017. Perhaps it’s just by chance that BGA was the first after such a long wait, but it’s hard to pick a better opening act to what would become the biggest run of new spotlights since 2011.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Lagom, a new member who started posting screens in mid-2015, was quickly approaching completion of his Liseberg recreation. A very ambitious project that had really started turning heads a few months earlier due to Lagom’s rapid skill improvement he was displaying through the few screens and posts he made. Much like Robbie, significant issues skirting the object limit delayed the release of the park by a few weeks, and forced Lagom to forgo the classic blacktiling effect that most NE parks used. However, finally on the 15th of March, Liseberg was released. Everyone was blown away, the level of atmosphere, scale and attention to detail was incredibly high for a member’s first release. It was a Spotlight!

Liseberg by Lagom

Liseberg by Lagom

Notching a solid 85%, Lagom was now an Elite Parkmaker on his first release, earning the coveted red nametag on the site. While certainly a little more controversial in its Spotlight designation than BGA, it’s hard to deny the level of quality and uniqueness that Lagom provided us with Liseberg. It’s also one of the first RCT2 spotlight parks to designate a notable portion of the map to the park’s surroundings, and this subtle shift in focus from park to surroundings and “non-park” content, which certainly has become more popular since then, within an ever shifting meta that has begun to be more tolerable of non stereotypical themepark content on the site.

The spring of 2016 at New Element also saw former moderator Kumba, after much clamoring for a new contest by the community, host his independent Survivor contest. In which each competitor has 72 hours to fill in a 30x30 square on one of two maps anonymously, using NSCO. Then, the squares are eliminated survivor style, meaning that the lowest quality squares are removed from the poll and voting is hosted again until 1 square from each map remains. The last surviving square from each of the two maps is then voted on Head-2-Head style to choose the winner. This style of contest is rooted in the RCT club dynamics of the mid 2000s.

Both maps produced many high quality squares, with standout contributions by Kumba himself, dr dirt, Ling, Bigshootergill, along with Stoksy, Cocoa, Fisch and Louis. The final results were released on April 10th, and in classic Kumba contest fashion, he named himself the winner by a score of 10 to 7 over Louis. Kumba’s square titled Black Mamba vs. Taipan is truly a very sweet dueling B&M monstrosity that was well deserving of the Survivor 2016 crown.

Kumba's plot on Survivor

Fisch's plot on Survivor

By this point, a new version of RCT had become pretty well known amongst the New Element community. But this version was unlike any other, as it was a completely fan-made open source version of RCT2. Initially OpenRCT2, as it is officially designated, didn’t seem to offer much reason to be used, at least amongst us at New Element. As many were skeptical of alternative versions of the nearly 15 year old game after the flame-out of RCT Modified a few years earlier. Why change what isn’t broken?

I think I first heard of OpenRCT2 sometime in late summer or early fall of 2015. Initially, skeptical, like many others, as it lacked compatibility with the trainers that were vital to creating the hyper detailed custom scenery parks that New Element is known for. For those first few months, really the only feature that I felt was useful was its ability to eliminate ghost objects upon opening an SV6 savegame. I guess playing the game in fullscreen or in your custom resolution of choice was also nice, but at the time not worth switching over for actual building. However, gradually, over time, OpenRCT2 began to adopt and add features that New Element wanted. The ability to zero-clearance was a big one, although in a different way than the 8cars trainer, it proved to be far more user friendly, especially with large parks. These trainers, such as 8cars or Son of Beast, were absolutely critical to create the type of detailed parks and hacks that New Element is known for. But they grew increasingly frustrating and unwieldy as compatibility issues developed over the years and parks became increasingly more and more complex. OpenRCT2s features quickly absolved the need for any trainers at all. Another massive addition was the autosave feature, which probably could have cured endless heartache and saved countless hours of lost work over the years due to things like error trappers or misclicks. Next, all of the scenario editor tools were able to be unlocked while in normal build mode. Allowing you to edit your object selection while in game, move park gates, or even expand your map? Gasp! Then the tile inspector was added, a feature that allowed you to manipulate the objects on the map in a way like never before. Soon, a feature was added that allowed you to hide entrance huts, previously a process developed by geewhzz that was so painstaking and technical that most avoided it entirely.

All this was great, and so finally I and a few others began to adopt OpenRCT2 as their primary version of RCT for building parks. I still kept the vanilla version handy in-case an erroneous update messed with the appearance of our park or a meteor struck the developers server and left us with an unusable version of the game. A fear that was probably not justified at all, but at the time many of us were still skeptical as some mininsule features still lacked from Open, or of parks not being compatible with the original vanilla version of RCT2.